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Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Carbon wings

The EGEE stand is running a competition to win an iPod this week. Just guess how many jobs have been submitted to the EGEE Grid between 9am (local SC time) today and 6pm (again local SC time) tomorrow to be in with a chance. Just come down to the booth (588) and pop your guess on the back of a business card. Nearest guess wins.It's 8:00am (or so) here in Texas and is the morning of the first full day of Supercomputing. My body is still a bit confused by the 6 hour time difference, I should have had lunch by now, not to mention breakfast.Yesterday was a bit manic on the floor as this is my first SC and I'm in charge of the EGEE booth I had to make sure everything had turned up, was ready to go and our freebies were on display (the most important part of any SC booth). However we did have one tiny problem, they neglected to lay carpet on a 30ft by 2ft strip in the middle of our booth. So for most of the day I was chasing that up. I did get to see outside for a while at lunchtime. It is gorgeous over here, it may almost be winter for Texas but it was a heavenly summer's day in Ireland. We ended up walking along the river and saw lots of birds, terrapins and squirrels pretty much in the heart of the city.As evening, and the official opening approached, you could sense the pace quickening up on the booth and around us as everyone made last minute adjustments, double checked all arrangements and grabbed a bite to eat (the food for the evening was laid out slightly early for the exhibtors to enjoy before the mayhem began).The EGEE booth is down near the back so it took a while for the crowds to reach us but we did get our first guest quite early on. They were a representative from the PIGEON project, they scavenge resources trying to find a niche which they can exploit and make use of what others don't want. I got a hastily taken shot of them:It didn't take too long till we got some actual attendees to the booth and our freebies (I'll post some pictures later) disappeared quite quickly as we met some new faces, talked about their work and our work and made some contacts. For us exhibitors the night was three hours long as they let the journalists in from 6 to 7 and then everyone else from 7 to 9, it was pretty exhausting but fun.I'm not sure what today (and the next two) will bring, I need to go on a freebie hunt, no one on the stand brought back anything amazing yet from their travels but it is early days.Today on the stand we are running the following demos:11:00 to 12:00Demo 1 – European Grid IntitaiveDemo 2 – University of Westminister12:00 to 13:00Demo - EDGeS13:00 to 14:00Demo 1 – European Grid IntitaiveDemo 2 – UK National Grid Service Overview14:00 to 14:30Demo – SRM/SRB Interoperability14:30 to 15:00Demo – Grid Application Portal15:00 to 16:00Demo 1 – University of WestministerDemo 2 – OGF/EGEE/WLCG/OSG interoperability16:00 to 17:00Demo – OXGRID